Re: Language is not markup and markup is not language.

[Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

David LeBlanc wrote:
> 
> 
> P.S. Those who would argue that XML is a language might care to look up the
> notion of Turing Completeness among other things that diferentiate a
> programming language from a data structuring notation.

You have put your finger on the reason that XSLT is different from a
programming language. XSLT is not turing complete which means that there
are a variety of optimizations and checks that can be applied that are
impossible to provide in a programming language. It also means that XSL is
easier to learn than an XML-optimized programming language because the set
of concepts is much smaller than the combination of a programming language
AND a sophisticated XML parsing/searching/traversing library.

XML and XSLT both live on one side of the declarative/Turing-complete
fence. Scripting languages live on the other side. We need both.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

The first three Noble Truths of Python:
  All that is not Python is suffering.
  The origin of suffering lies in the use of not-Python.
  The cessation of suffering can be achieved by not using not-Python.
http://www.pauahtun.org/4nobletruthsofpython.html


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